There was an air of exhaustion across Friday and Saturday in Voorhees, but a degree of optimism, too.
A long, turbulent season was finally over. The Flyers held their cleanout and exit interviews at their training center, and then the players, interim coach Brad Shaw, and general manager Danny Brière spoke to the media one more time before breaking for the summer.
And it'll be a crucial one.
They need a new coach. They have Matvei Michkov as a superstar in the making. They have a ton of draft picks to use in June and a bit of money to spend in July, too, and after spending the last few years trying to shed aging contracts while stocking up on the future, Brière said he wants this past season to be the turning point where the Flyers stop subtracting and start adding.
They're going to be busy.
But before fully turning the page to the coaching search, the draft, and the offseason on the whole, here are a few more thoughts from leaving Voorhees this past weekend…
Tortorella's complicated legacy
The lingering questions to the players stemming from John Tortorella's firing late last month were inevitable.
Sean Couturier, as the captain, admitted that he didn't have much of a relationship with Tortorella, that he felt he was getting pushed aside at times, and that he didn't agree with the reasons why (provided he got any). He kept his head down, though. He said he didn't want to be a distraction for the team, and still being pretty recently back from a series of back issues that kept him out for a year and a half, he wanted to keep his focus on working up to where he felt his game should be.
"It's behind us now," Couturier said. "Moving forward, whoever's here, we'll be buying in and doing whatever we can to get back in the win column and get back to the playoffs."
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Cam York said he didn't think he "had necessarily much of a leash" with Tortorella behind the bench.
Nic Deslauriers, as a bottom-of-the-lineup checker who went in and out of the rotation for long stretches over the past couple of years, said he respected Tortorella but that the two did butt heads a few times.
And even just on the ice, Jakob Pelletier, the roster return who stayed put from the Joel Farabee-Morgan Frost trade to Calgary, didn't really settle into a role until Brad Shaw was handed the reins in the interim, and the same went for Tyson Foerster's offensive outburst down the final stretch.
But it isn't that black and white.
It was common to hear the thought throughout Friday and Saturday that Tortorella's tenure set a good foundation of accountability and work ethic for the team moving forward.
Matvei Michkov, the team's rapidly rising star who got benched a few times by Tortorella throughout his rookie season, said he was appreciative of everything the coach taught him and believes that he'll be carrying a lot of those lessons forward.
And even Brière, who made the call to fire him, said he did like the standard Tortorella set for the players while discussing the early steps of what he and the organization would be looking for in a new coach on Saturday.
"He made them accountable," the Flyers' GM said. "He was hard, but demanded a lot. The accountability part, really, I think is going to leave something good for the next coach that comes into place, and now it's finding a coach that can take it to another level."
Tortorella brought good. He brought bad, too, especially by the end when the Flyers were spiraling and it seemed clear that his act was wearing thin.
But really it goes back to what Brière said about Tortorella the day he fired him: "Torts is a complicated man. He's a complicated coach."
And his run in Philadelphia, just shy of three years, is probably always going to be complicated to look back on.
About the next coach
The new coaching search is the Flyers' priority, but as of Saturday, Brière said they had only just gotten started on that process.
They hadn't started interviewing, the GM explained, or even made a short list of candidates. The focus for that weekend, he continued, was in meeting with all the players on the way out before the summer.
Brière did re-state, though, that strong communication and the ability to teach are the two main qualities the Flyers are going to be looking for, but he also didn't want to limit the organization to any particular mold, like a pre-established NHL coach or an unproven college one.
He also said that interim coach Brad Shaw will be in the running. After the work he did with the Flyers' defensemen throughout the past several years and then with the entire team in the past several weeks, he earned a look.
But then Monday in the NHL brought some potential key wrinkles in the Flyers' search: the Seattle Kraken fired Dan Bylsma after just one season, and not much longer after he and his staff had developed their AHL affiliate in Coachella into a Calder Cup contender, and the Vancouver Canucks declined Rick Tocchet's contract option, offering him a new deal but while simultaneously putting the ball in the former Flyer's court over whether or not he stays.
This quote from Canucks president Jim Rutherford regarding Tocchet's status, via ESPN, was also a bit of a head-turner:
"We don't feel it's right to have somebody here that may have his mind somewhere else. I'd say that about anybody. This is not just about Toc. We believe that — and I believe that — Toc and his coaching staff did as good a job coaching this team this year as they did the year before when he was coach of the year." [ESPN]
"Somewhere else," huh?
One more thing of note regarding the early part of the search: David Carle, the high-profile college coach out of Denver, isn't expected to be a serious candidate for the Flyers, per The Philadelphia Inquirer's Jackie Spiegel.
And the next step
The season was tough for the Flyers, and in a lot of instances, a brutal reminder of just how far they really have to go.
They're not going to be competing for the Stanley Cup anytime soon, but at the same time, they are getting younger and with more fresh talent on the way in the form of Jett Luchanko, Oliver Bonk, Denver Barkey, Alex Bump, and whoever they come away with in the draft in a couple of months.
Brière also made mention on Saturday that the team, as it is right now, he believes is much closer to the one that overachieved into a near playoff push two years ago, rather than the one that just stalled out through painful stretches in this last 82-game grind.
Travis Konecny, when he spoke on Friday, knows Cup contention is way off on the horizon. But the playoffs, that one might be manageable next year.
"I don't think we're that far from playoffs," Konecny said. "I think next year, depending on what happens this summer, there's a very realistic opportunity at being in the playoffs. Then it's a hard question, because once you get in, you never know what happens, right?"
"We still got a young team," Konecny added. "We still got guys developing, but I think all the pieces we have right now, we are capable of getting in, for sure."
Konecny, Michkov, Couturier, Foerster, Noah Cates, Bobby Brink, Owen Tippett (though he'll need a bounce-back year), Travis Sanheim, and Cam York mostly make up the current run of pieces already there, and Brière said he wanted this past season to be the last where the Flyers subtract from the roster and start adding – they'll have some money opening up under the salary cap along with a ton of draft capital this summer to work with.
Garnet Hathaway also had an interesting, and reassuring, perspective on how this season, as bad as it got, will help the Flyers down the line.
Said the veteran winger during his turn with the media:
"I'm gonna quote someone again, but I think it was my second year in Calgary. Glen Gulutzan was my coach. He came in and we had gone through a stretch where we had our fate in our hands, and we let it slip away. He came in and…basically he said 'The obstacle is the way.'
"And I nodded my head like 'Yup, definitely'…Not a clue, right? Like, how could that make sense at all? It doesn't…
"Then you start realizing, what does that mean? And over the years, little things, injuries, what impedes motion, advances action. What we went through this year will help us get to where we want to be. Being a Flyers fan, it's tough this year, more than other years, but trust us that we are trusting our management and we're putting our effort on the ice in order to be Stanley Cup Champions."
Not now, of course. But eventually…hopefully…
It's a long, long road ahead still, yet the past eight months or so can be a step forward on it, so long as the Flyers make it one.
"You take those ups and downs that we had this year, "Hathaway continued. "You find yourself in a situation with adversity, with trades, with guys who mean so much to our locker room and to the Flyers organization, right? A guy who had been here his whole career gets sent out, who was an unbelievable guy in [Scott Laughton], and that's the obstacle.
"Who steps up? Who finds their voice? Who picks the guy up next to them? I think that's how you look at this year."
Now it's about how all that shapes into the next step.
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